J. C. Stobart

“ To the Englishman of to-day Rome is in some ways far more familiar than Greece. Apart from obvious resemblances in history and in character, Rome touches our own domestic history, and any man who has marked the stability of old Roman foundations or the straightness of old Roman roads has already grasped a fundamental truth about her. He is surely not far wrong in the general sense of irresistible power, of blind energy and rigid law, which he associates with the name of Rome. Thus, there is not as there was in the case of Greece any radical misconception of the Roman character to be combated. ”

“ He sang without conviction, without a spark of Sapphic fire or a note of natural music, but the noble rhetoric of the Roman schools in the golden age supported him. He laboured for the right word never in vain. No writer has ever equalled his matchless gift for making truisms sound true. No other writer has been able to assert that “it is sweet and comely to die for the fatherland,” or that “life is short” with an equal air of genuine wisdom. Latin with its terse precision is the ideal language for the expression of platitudes. His patriotic eloquence is Roman rhetoric of the best kind. ”

“ Although at first sight the peninsula looks as if it possessed a geographical unity, yet a second glance shows that Nature has split it up into numberless small plains and valleys divided from one another by sea and mountain. Such a country, as we see in Wales, Switzerland, and Scotland, encourages a polity of clans and cantons, each jealous of its neighbour over the hill, and each cherishing a fierce local patriotism. Nature, moreover, has provided each plain with its natural citadel. Greece and Italy are both rich in these self-made fortresses. ”

“ Thus geography has made it exceedingly probable that Crete will play a momentous part in the earliest history of Europe. That island lies like a doorstep at the threshold of Europe. If civilisation was to rise with the sun in the East, out of the extremely ancient civilisations of Egypt and Babylon, by way of those earliest carriers to the world’s markets, the Phœnicians of Tyre and Sidon, clearly this island{15} of Crete would be their stepping-stone to Europe. Thus we reason, knowing it to be the truth. But we should never have learnt the truth from literature. ”

“ Latin may be an acquired taste, but no sort of excellence is mortal. Latin will come into its own again along with Dryden and Congreve, along with patches and periwigs. Meanwhile it must be a very dull soul who is unmoved by the grandeur of Roman history, the triumphant march of the citizen legions, the dogged patriotism which resisted Hannibal to the death, and the pageantry and splendour of the Empire. One must be blind not to admire the massive strength of her ruined monuments, arches, bridges, roads, and aqueducts. ”

“ Sparta is the antithesis of Athens, and yet, if any one would know Greece, he must realise that both are essentially and characteristically Greek. Each is the complement of the other. Without Sparta Greece would lack its most remarkable figure in the realm of politics, as well as its chief bulwark in land warfare. These are the two sides of Sparta on which we ought to fix our attention—the political system which gave her the best, or at any rate the most stable, government in Greek history, and the military education and discipline which gave her the finest army. ”

“ What thou owest to the stock of Nero, O Rome, let Metaurus’ flood bear witness, and the defeated Hasdrubal, and that fair dawn that drove the darkness from Latium.... And at length spake treacherous Hannibal: “We are but deer, the prey of ravening wolves, but lo! we are pursuing those whom to escape is a rare triumph.... No proud ambassadors now shall I send to Carthage perished, perished is all our hope and all the fortune of our race, for Hasdrubal is dead.” ”

“ Cæsar had no brother and no legitimate son. Across in Apollonia his little great-nephew Octavius was still at school. Julius Cæsar had to reorganise a broken world alone. For a hundred years there had been no peace in Rome, and no proper government in the empire. Every year of its lingering agony, the Republic had drawn closer to the inevitable issue in Monarchy. Even Cicero, when he tried to console himself for the horrible disorders of Roman life by depicting an ideal commonwealth, had been compelled to build it round a princeps who should maintain order, and thus allow liberty to exist. ”

“ Aristotle regards Monarchy as a good form of government also, if you could secure that the monarch should be better than the people he rules, and should rule for their advantage, not his own. There is also a good form of Republic or Free Constitution, in which the whole body of the citizens take their turn in office. But each of these three sound forms of government has its own special danger—Aristocracy degenerates into Oligarchy when the few rule for their own advantage, Monarchy into Tyranny, and the Free Constitution into Democracy. ”

“ The Pharsalia is unmixed declamation, rhetoric shouting at top pitch on page after page. Vergil had accomplished the literary epic to perfection: to carry it any further in the same direction was to incur tediousness. Above all, both Lucan and Silius lacked the greatest of all Vergil’s gifts, his wonderful ear for verbal music. Vergil, like Milton, presented his epic diluted for mortal ears with music and human nature. It was not in the spirit that Lucan failed. He admired the republican cause and Pompeius, its champion, quite as sincerely as Vergil admired Augustus or Milton Cromwell. ”

“ The Athens that we know intimately is the Athens of the Restoration. Really we know almost nothing of fifth-century Athens but her external politics and the remains of her monuments. The restored Athens is the city of Plato, of Demosthenes, and of Praxiteles. She has still to be the mother of philosophy, ethics, oratory, political science, comedy of manners, logic, grammar, and the essay and the dialogue as forms of literature. This is the only Athens which we know at all intimately from within. ”

“ If Lucretius carries the heaviest metal of Latin poets, Catullus has by far the lightest touch. He writes with an ease which makes Horace seem laboured, and with a simplicity which makes Propertius and even Ovid look like pedants, though Catullus himself, like all Romans, thought fit occasionally to adopt the classical pose, and fill his verses with learned allusions. If it were not for the influence of the schoolroom, to which most of Catullus’s work is for the best of reasons unknown, he would be recognised as possessing far more of the vital spark of poetry than Horace. ”

“ The goddess, clad in her helmet, leans upon her spear, with head bent down, to read the names once painted on a short pillar which is part of the relief. The severe lines of her drapery indicate the austerity of the unknown artist’s treatment of his patriotic theme. This is the speech of Pericles in stone. I have chosen also two less-known monuments from the Athenian Museum to show the Athenian view of death more clearly. The dead hero does not mourn, but his humbler friends, like the Giants and Barbarians of the friezes, may express their emotion visibly and indecently. ”

“ Of course a single poet with Ovid’s sinister gifts was doing far more to corrupt Rome than all the Julian legislation could do to reform it, and we may fairly conclude that Ovid with his attacks on the traditional Roman morality and religion, together with effeminate bards like Tibullus who sang of the horrors of war, were more than undoing the patriotic work of Vergil and Horace. The plain fact is that though you may hire writers you cannot purchase the spirit of a people, and so Augustus and Mæcenas found, to the great misfortune of the Roman Empire. ”

“ We are forced to believe in the existence of a real Homer who set himself, as Hesiod did in a different sphere, to collect the praises of the heroes and to fashion them into immortal verse, grouping the various heroes into one Panhellenic army under the leadership of Agamemnon in a great expedition, probably an echo of real history, against the city of Troy. But it is equally certain that our Iliad and Odyssey are not the untouched composition of a single brain. ”

“ We must never forget, when we praise the artistic and intellectual genius of Greece, that she alone rolled back the tide of Persian conquest at Marathon and Salamis, or that Greek troops under Alexander marched victoriously over half the known world. But it is not in the field of action that her greatness lies. She won battles by superior discipline, superior strategy, and superior armour. As soon as she had to meet a race of born soldiers, in the Romans, she easily succumbed. Her methods of fighting were always defensive in the main. ”

“ When we turn to consider the Art of the period, we must not forget to carry with us the light that we have obtained from the study of its literature. For Augustus and his assistants were attempting precisely similar ends in both regions. With temples, baths, circuses, amphitheatres, colonnades, libraries, and statues the new regime was to flourish its magnificence in the eyes of the world and, above all, to dazzle the citizens of Rome, fill up the emptiness of their lives, and make them forget, if it were possible, the magnitude of their loss. ”

“ L’Empire c’est la paix. There are many signs of the earnest longing for Peace in the Roman world. “Pax” and “Irene” became common names in the West and East; “Pax” was the legend on coins. This was a new thing at Rome. Hitherto war had been the desired as well as the normal condition. But even the Romans had now drunk their fill of bloodshed in those dreary civil wars. It was upon this new condition of things that Augustus had the wisdom to build his monarchy. ”

“ In his versatile intelligence, his cosmopolitan habits as a soldier of fortune, in his youthful enthusiasm for philosophy, and in the journalistic spirit which prompted him to write pamphlets on any topic which interested him, no less than in his dislike of democracy, Xenophon is perhaps the most characteristic figure of the fourth century, though he is too military and too conservative to be a typical Athenian of any age. ”

“ So while our eyes are fixed upon the sins and follies of Roman emperors and courtiers, until we get an impression of rotten tyranny conducted according to the caprice of monsters and fools, all the time the greater part of Europe was advancing in peace to a state of general culture and civilisation such as it had never known before, and such as it never knew again until the nineteenth century. A casual glance over the inscriptions of a provincial town probably gives us a truer impression than all the rhetoric of the historians. ”

“ The dialogue of “Phædo” is perhaps the sublimest thing in literature. It purports to be the last discourse of Socrates to the friends who have come to share his last moments. He preaches the immortality of the soul, the unimportance of death, nay, the urgent necessity of that release from the hampering and deluding trammels of the body, if a philosopher is to see things as they are and enjoy the knowledge of reality. He puts it as a “myth,” using the current Greek mythology of Styx and Hades and Tartarus to enforce his doctrine of Hell, Paradise, and Purgatory. ”

“ The Italian is not, and probably never was a great natural eater or drinker judged by northern standards. But rhetoricians and satirists have delighted to dwell upon the immensity of Roman dinner-parties which often lasted all day and included a hideous series of curious and exotic dainties. This was the form which, in default of any nobler ideals, wealth at Rome had chosen for its display. Time hung heavily on this slave-tended aristocracy: to dine from dawn to daylight was one of the ways of killing it. ”

“ Liberals, on the other hand—and we are all Liberals nowadays—dislike Sparta, as representing oligarchy against democracy and as having sold the liberty of Greece to the Persians. And yet the Spartans practised equality, which the Athenians praised, as no people on earth have ever practised it, and in selling Greece to Persia they were only bidding against Athens. Other people despise Sparta as the one Greek people which contributed hardly anything to literature and art. ”

“ They are no spurious growth of the so-called “degenerate Empire.” On one occasion, when the music of some Greek flute-players failed to please a Roman audience, the presiding magistrate ordered the unlucky artists to fight one another, and the hoots of the crowd were instantly transformed to rapturous applause.
All the arts were held in contempt, all were entrusted to slaves or the poorest kind of citizens. Thus Hellenic civilisation was transported to Rome under a double disadvantage. Not only was Greek civilisation itself already past its prime, but it was interpreted largely by slaves. ”